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| Wednesday Feb 25, 2026 | |
| Two weeks ago, we wrote about the planned retirement of JH Campbell in Michigan. After three emergency orders from the Department of Energy (DOE), the coal plant was required to remain online through February 17th, 2026, despite plans to retire in 2025. Last week, a fourth order was issued. JH Campbell must now remain online through May 18th, 2026, almost a full year after its original planned retirement date. The Michigan coal plant is not the only one; the lives of two other MISO coal plants are being extended through similar orders, as well as plants in Colorado and Washington. Unit 2 of the FB Culley coal plant in Indiana with a capacity of less than 0.1 GW was expected to retire at the end of 2025. Two units at the RM Schahfer plant, also in Indiana, with 0.7 GW of capacity were ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Feb 24, 2026 | |
| In our latest article titled “Bottoms Down – CA Batteries”, we explore how California’s battery fleet is adapting to shifting natural-gas fundamentals and evolving power-market price patterns. Borrowing from the celebratory phrase “bottoms up,” the piece reframes the concept as “bottoms down,” symbolizing a market environment where low prices (especially on the natural-gas side) are increasingly shaping battery dispatch strategies and profitability. Instead of relying on sharp price spikes, operators are now navigating flatter spreads and more persistent low-price conditions. Figure 1 | SoCal Citygate Cash Settle Prices A key driver of this shift is the strong supply of natural gas across the Western region following a warmer-than-normal ... » read more | |
| Monday Feb 23, 2026 | |
| The cycling of weather conditions across the country is displaying another round where the Northeast is getting hit with a massive amount of snow that is delaying flights, cancelling schools and having city officials asking everyone to stay home where it is much safer. The Upper Midwest is working through another set of cold days that look to return next weekend as well where Minneapolis is showing lows in single digits while the highs are in the mid-20’s. Further south, the skies are open and the sun is shining in Texas while wind generation is a mixed back across the Plains. Figure 1 | Lower 48 DD Forecast vs. Last Year and Normal – By 5 Day Periods The West is turning the corner after a brief winter cold front moved through last week that brought with it precipitation in ... » read more | |
| Friday Feb 20, 2026 | |
| The weather across Texas the past few days has been warm and sunny, with plenty of generation from both solar and wind. Figure 1 | Weather Forecast for Selected TX Cities The combination of moderate demand plus abundant renewables has resulted in extremely low net load levels and put the grid in a state of oversupply. The figure below steps through the net load components for the past week: Figure 2 | ERCOT Net Load Breakdown, 2/12/26 – 2/20/26 The top pane of the figure shows load. The second pane shows wind and solar; the shaded areas show the actual generation that materialized, while the green line shows the combined forecasted potential generation. The difference between the two is partially due to forecast error, but a more important driver on days with this level of ... » read more | |
| Thursday Feb 19, 2026 | |
| The Northeast is enjoying some long-awaited warmer weather after a solid block of frigid cold that lingered over the region for the final week of January and first half of February. Total daily HDDs are plotted for different markets throughout the East in the figure below, including PJM, where after sitting between 45-52 HDDs for much of the mentioned period (the block of dark blue colored bars in the figure), temperatures warmed by around 20 degrees as of the past couple of days. PJM daily peak system load has dropped from a high of 137.6 GW back on the 9th of February to under 100 GW yesterday, with similar numbers expected tonight and the next two days. Over the same period, net load in PJM fell by over 40 GW from 103 GW to under 63 GW. For pure thermal demand (coal and natural gas) ... » read more | |
| Wednesday Feb 18, 2026 | |
| The anticipation of cold temperatures hitting the western portion of North America brough excitement for the local skiers and snowboarders as the previous six weeks has delivered sparse conditions in the mountains. Over the past 48 hours, Mother Nature started pushing the precipitation in the mountains where the snowpack accumulation is rising, which will be the case for the lower and middle elevation sections of the mountains the balance of the week. Figure 1 | Snowpack Needed in the Pacific Northwest California was tracking like the Pacific Northwest since the start of the calendar year, so the current conditions mentioned above were targeted for the Golden State as well. This is good news for the Sierra Mountain region and the resorts in Tahoe as the forecast was ... » read more | |
| Tuesday Feb 17, 2026 | |
| Western Canada’s energy outlook is shifting quickly as the latest AESO forecast signals a transition from unusually warm conditions to a much colder regime through mid-to-late February. Much of Alberta and BC have recently been running well above seasonal norms, keeping heating demand subdued and regional gas balances relatively comfortable. However, forecasts show temperatures dropping sharply this week, with overnight lows in Calgary and Edmonton falling into negative territory. This shift from warm anomalies to sustained cold marks an inflection point for regional fundamentals, relatively tightening supply-demand balances as winter reasserts itself. Figure 1 | AG2 Trader, Western Canada Temperature Forecast So far this month, fundamentals have reflected the mild weather ... » read more | |
| Monday Feb 16, 2026 | |
| Mother Nature has pushed colder weather east of the Rockies in early December, again at the end of January 2026 and finally the beginning of February kept the Midwest and Northeast quite cold. Throughout this stretch of winter, the West has been looking from the outside-in as December 2025 was the warmest in over a decade while the first six weeks of 2026 have been above normal from Western Canada down to Southern California and over to the Desert Southwest. Figure 1 | Pacific Northwest Winter Weather Along with the warmer temperatures came massive precipitation in the form of rainfall and higher elevation snowpack over the December holiday season. Flash flooding was in the conversation in Northern Washington State and parts of Oregon while California was being impacted by cloud ... » read more | |
| Friday Feb 13, 2026 | |
| The California (CA) Resource Adequacy (RA) market for 2026 rose from Q3-2022, peaked in Q2-2024, and has since declined sharply due to grid conditions. By 2025, values returned to levels seen four years earlier. Figure 1 illustrates this trend, which remains a topic of discussion within Energy GPS’s Production Cost Modeling ecosystem. If you are in need of such insight via a consulting arrangement around specific projects or comparison to internal analysis, please reach out to us via the Contact Us former on the Energy GPS website (under About Us) or email [email protected]. Figure 1 | 2026 California RA prices as a function of mark date. For example, throughout the upward trend detailed above, we have been forecasting supply and demand balances where the 18 months saw a ... » read more | |
| Thursday Feb 12, 2026 | |
| After a wild and wet December, which brought near record precipitation to the Pacific Northwest region and set up the hydro system for success with strong flows and lots of water in storage behind the dams throughout the Columbia River basin, 2026 thus far has been very dry and very warm. These two factors together have led to a change in the outlook for the water year, prompted by a long, drawn-out decline in forecasted runoff ahead during the spring along with plateauing snow pack with very little new additions over January and early February. The water supply forecast for unregulated flows at The Dalles this water year between January and July has declined from a high of 105.7 MAF (102% of the 30-year average) back in mid-December to a low of 94 MAF (91% of average) late last month on ... » read more | |